✨️ Finish him. ✨️

Imagine telling Yann LeCun what is and isn’t right when it comes to science

I like the sentiment, but there are non-peer reviewed papers that are real science. Politics and funding are real things, and there is a bit of gatekeeping here, which isn't really good IMHO.

Also, reproducibility is a sticky subject, especially with immoral experiments (which can still be the product of science, however unsavory), or experiments for which there are only one apparatus in the world (e.g., some particle physics).

The rules and conventions to do science today are quite well known and understood by educated people (including of course Helen Mosque) ... but any rules have exceptions :
Project Manhattan to produce the atomic bomb was secret science : in many countries military will have secret science development. Pharmaceutical companies will do as well.
People in those projects will not have recognition by the wider public but they will have recognition from their group.

I am a bit worried the response to this here is not a unified everyone's an asshole in this screenshot.

Academic publishing is in a very sorry state for a long time by now. A lot of research that is published is not reproducible. A lot of actual research is also in fact never published like that because companies base their products on it and publish those results only as patents.

So just by trying to be smug and oppose the Muskie you show yourself to be an idiot. Well done.

She's wrong though, everything following the scientific method is science. The fact that you didn't pay out of your ass to publicize your research doesn't matter. Of course it reaches less people, but that's a separate issue.

Btw his bio is:

• Professor at NYU
• Chief AI Scientist at Meta
• ACM Turing Award Laurete

If you science in a lab and no one is around to review it did you make a science?

There are differences between "experimenting", "research", "analysis" and "science". You can do the first three at your home, scribbling some notes that no one will ever read or know about, but science, in its hard definition, is a methodology that requires the specific dynamics that are expected of the scientific community, where plenty of people check each other's work for faults, blind spots, biases, lazy interpretations and so on.

This is fundamental because everyone, including universally recognized geniuses, do sometimes fuck up. Have you heard of Einstein's famous phrase "God does not play dice with the universe"? This refers to his conviction that the laws of physics were fundamentally deterministic, which was put in question by the early experiments that were opening the way for quantum physics. Einstein found himself at odds with a new generation of physicists that weren't as inflexible as he was on this issue, and whenever there were indications that extremely small particles may behave in a non-deterministic way, Einstein would argue and push for the most hostile interpretation possible, which did lead other physicists to put his interpretations to the test, which did ironically further prove the non-deterministic pillars of quantum physics.

Science is necessarily a social endeavor because it is meant to help us overcome the fact that each individual human is doomed to be, sooner or later, at one specific issue of many, an inflexible idiot.

I've seen published scientific papers that were written by chatgpt, complete with prompts.

Fuck, I really hate to agree with Elon on anything, but that is a ridiculous argument. LeCun must also really believe that trees only fall in the woods when someone is around to see it happen.

Couldn't science papers be hosted on a git-platform for review? Instead of costly publishing and the reviewers have to buy it then...

Seems like a very elitist and gatekeeping perspective, specially considering how closed off the academic world is for the rest of society in some places, never mind expensive to publish. It's also basically saying that if you, say, come up with a groundbreaking hypothesis, that that's not science until you get a research paper out, and that might require mastery that goes beyond the hypothesis.

Sure, this might stop most of the looney theories from being called Science, but it also prevents public access in favor of those with the means and capacity to sustain an ever more complex geocentric model of the fashion of the times, from which any divergent theories must generally part from or involve renown in.

You think the person who made that hypothesis will die bitter and forgotten? Is that the general view of people who are not Scientists by Scientists? They might know what's up, and might not want the gatekeeper to take all the credit, as is often the case in academic circles, and might just feel satisfaction in seeing their hypothesis gratified. They might place more importance in exploring and understanding reality than compensating for personal insecurities. Perhaps it is science itself that might stagnate by stalling until it itself is able to discover these hypothesis under the properly accepted emeritus when they are eventually able to get to it.

Mostly it's just looney theories, but given Musk is involved, I imagine this discussion involves proprietary patents that do have a lot of research involved and under peer review of teams under non-disclosure agreements. Then again, it's Musk, could be mostly looney theories too. But the fact that it involves Musk, the man living off of Nikola Tesla's fame, a man whose demise could have been described to have occurred under the circumstances of a bitter and forgotten end, makes the gatekeeping particularly ironic.

There's private company r&d science and military science as well, even though those aren't academic science with it's peer review and publication.

how about you figure out how to make a gas pedal that doesn't try to kill people before you talk shit?

tl;dr: science is in the eye of the beholder, you can only know if it's science if the methods are transparent and you have access to data, as well as critiques from unbiased parties.

This thread seems to have formed two sides:

1. unless it's published, peer reviewed and replicated it's not science, and
2. LeCun is being elitist, science doesn't have to be published. This point of view often is accompanied by something about academic publishing being inaccessible or about corporate/private/closed science still being science.

I would say that "closed"/unpublished science may be science, but since peer review and replication of results are the only way we can tell if something is legitimate science, the problem is that we simply can't know until a third party (or preferably, many third parties) have reviewed it.

There are a lot of forms that review can take. The most thorough is to release it to the world and let anyone read and review it, and so it and the opinions of others with expertise in the subject are also public. Anyone can read both the publications and response, do their own criticism, and know whether it is science.

If "closed" science has been heavily reviewed and critiqued internally, by as unbiased a party as possible, then whoever has access to the work and critique can know it's science, but the scientific community and the general public will never be able to be sure.

The points folks have made about individuals working in secret making progress actually support this; I'll use Oppenheimer as an example.

In the 40s, no one outside the Manhattan project knew how nuclear bombs were made. Sure, they exploded, but no one outside that small group knew if the reasoning behind why they exploded was correct.

Now, through released records, we know what the supporting theory was, and how it was tested. We also know that subsequent work based on that theory (H-bomb development, etc.) and replication (countries other than the US figuring out how to make nukes, in some cases without access to US documents on how it was originally done) was successful and supported the original explanations of why it worked. So now we all know that it was science.

Real science is trying random stuff until you get slightly better performance out of your model and then creating contrived explanations for why you think it worked

btw yann lecun is the head of meta ai so this is just a couple of rich dickheads having a slap fight

They both come across as pompous asses in this one.

If you develop a product in secret, take it to market, and make a fortune off it, far more people will know your name than almost any scientist.

The part 1 when musk was like "that's nothing" to 40 publications per year. Lmao what a fucking dumbass.

This person seems like an ass. Science is only when you publish peer reviewed papers. Ok so you're telling me Archimedes and Eratosthenes and al-Kwharzimi and Newton and everyone who figured shit out before the modern system of academia wasn't doing science? This is not a defense of

Well somebody is about to find his Twitter account closed for a spurious reason.

Yann LeCun is not a good person, but at least he's significantly smarter than Elon

Every time I see Elon's picture in one of these posts, my brain tells me he's wearing an Ant Man costume.

The best emoji for defending your fragile self esteem: 🤣

I'd say someone should get Musk some burn cream, but he can afford to get it himself.

That ratio is sad. Elon stans are deranged.

Now gather round chillun, sometimes, I say sometimes, you know, sometimes ... one should shut up and be rich.

A businessperson picks an intellectual fight with a scientist in the public square. We humbly suggest for due consideration, to 'take under advisement', or 'run through the handlers', that perhaps, possibly, although we could be wrong, or locked onto the wrong VOR while navigating this latest PR disaster, but just maybe, the global reputational maximum (don't even need gradient descent for this one brah), is to be quiet with ones insecurities, rather than ham-fistedly operate the mouth, removing all doubt, and thus broadcasting the spectacle to the internet (a series of tubes), which will still hold said incident in its memory banks longer than any wetware.

Plus, as an added insult + injury bonus, AI models will slurp this incident into their learning like a line of Bon Ami snorted off a 3-day old third-pan of 'temalees' in a gas station 'buffet' (please avoid the sushi) on the way to nowhere.

All nibbles and bytes are immortal now and forever more!

DWord to your motherboard.

I've read plenty of times about bullshit published papers that disprove it must be correct and reproducable to get published.

Edit: Where did I claim it was or wasn't science? I'm pointing out the statement that "to be published it must be checked for correctness" simply isn't true.

Never thought I’d say this but I’m on Elon’s side this time. If you’re seeking new information about the world and generally following the scientific method you’re doing science.

Is it good science? That’s a different question.

As a trans person, I fucking hate Elon Musk. But as a chaos magician, I gotta take his side on this debate. Mainstream scientific publications won't take research that's sufficiently "silly" or "esoteric", and magic falls under these even when the scientific method is used. Now, many people have published works on chaos magic such as books, but not so much with publishing in reputable scientific journals.